Suicide is a leading cause of death among inmates. Can jails do more?

Suicide is a leading cause of death among inmates. Can jails do more?

Devlin Epding, The Virginian-Pilot

Wed, December 3, 2025 at 3:40 PM UTC

10 min read

Editor’s note: This story discusses suicide. If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, call or text 988 or chat 988lifeline.org. Local crisis services can be reached at 757-656-7755.

Before Sheriff Rocky Holcomb discussed the circumstances around the deaths of several inmates while they were in custody at the Virginia Beach Correctional Center, he insisted on playing a video.

The body camera footage was from five days prior. It showed staff wearing personal protective equipment tending to a 43-year-old inmate who was strapped to a restraint chair in the medical isolation unit and verbally sparring with staff. He attempted to pull his vein from his arm and sat near a small pool of blood, some of which had splattered on his cell walls.

The man has been incarcerated inside Virginia Beach Correctional Center several times and has a goal of dying in a jail, according to Holcomb. He’s currently jailed on felony assault charges. Each time he hurts himself, he’s transported to a local hospital for treatment before returning to the jail’s medical isolation unit, where inmates with mental health issues receive high-intensity supervision. He had returned from receiving care for another incident an hour before Holcomb sat for an interview.

For Holcomb, the man represents one of the greatest challenges deputies face in operating local jails — how to handle people with serious mental health issues.

Nationally, suicide was the cause of death in about a third of all local jail deaths between 2008 and 2018, according to a Bureau of Justice Statistics report that analyzed mortality in local jails. Suicide was the leading cause of death for inmates in 2018, outpacing heart disease and drug or alcohol intoxication.

The general population cells in the Virginia Beach Correctional Center are visually checked twice an hour in accordance with state law, Holcomb said. Inmates on non-acute suicide watch are checked every 15 minutes, and inmates on acute suicide watch are under constant direct observation in a wing of the mental health unit.

However, Holcomb said staff cannot be everywhere at once, leaving room for others, such as 49-year-old Michael Margulies to get overlooked. Margulies died by suicide in June at Virginia Beach Correctional Center.

“We understand that when folks come here, they’re generally going through the worst part of their lives ever,” Holcomb said. “We’re understanding of that, and we work hard to make sure that we see the signs, read the signs and can manage them. But we can’t predict them all the time.”

Attempts to contact Margulies’ family were unsuccessful. His death is one of two at Virginia Beach Correctional Center this year, the same number as the year prior, according to documents provided by the sheriff’s office. As of Sept. 15, the jail had 11 suicide attempts, more than double the five reported in 2024.

Norfolk City Jail has also had two in-custody deaths this year, the same as the year prior, with 22 suicide attempts as of Sept. 15. One death was due to natural causes, according to the Norfolk Sheriff’s Office, while the other was the result of a “medical emergency” before the booking process. Newport News City Jail had the most deaths in custody across Hampton Roads with three this year and three last year. Two of the 2025 deaths were suicides, while the third was due to cardiovascular disease. That jail has seen 29 suicide attempts as of Sept. 15 compared with 44 in 2024. Other jails in the region did not report any in-custody deaths this year.

Mental health in jails

Virginia Beach is one of the largest jails in the commonwealth, averaging more than 1,000 inmates every day. According to Holcomb, 63% of inmates receive some sort of mental health medication. He said the correctional center isn’t equipped to support that many people who need specialized care.

“The problem with it is the jails — they’re not really designed to control the suicidal and the mentally ill,” Holcomb said. “It’s designed for incarceration.”

Nationally, more than 40% of jail suicides from 2000-19 occurred within a week of admission and two-thirds within a month, according to data from Prison Policy Initiative, a nonprofit focused on criminal justice research. From 2000-18, half of all jail suicides were inmates who had been incarcerated for nine or fewer days.

The first 96 hours of incarceration are the most critical for keeping new inmates alive, according to Holcomb. Every person who comes into the facility completes a screening that includes more than two pages dedicated to flagging behavioral risks. Some of the questions included in the screening:

Are you having suicidal/homicidal thoughts right now?
If yes, are they related to your current incarceration?
Do you currently engage in self-harming behaviors?
Have you experienced recent physical/sexual/emotional abuse?

Inmates are then transferred based on their responses, whether that’s a community environment, a single cell or direct observation, Holcomb said. The jail even converted a housing unit into a mental health observation wing to help manage inmates who required it.

But medical emergencies are frequent — from three to seven per day, Holcomb said. That includes situations such as seizures as well as self-harm incidents.

When up to five deputies at a time are responding to each medical emergency, that can quickly deplete resources from an already short-staffed office. The correctional center has 503 staff members, including deputies and civilian personnel, and is operating with 48 positions vacant, according to Virginia Beach Sheriff’s Office spokesperson Toni Guagenti.

Holcomb said he’d like to invest in more tools to oversee the jail’s inmates. The sheriff’s office has a $70.2 million budget for the current fiscal year, a roughly $100,000 increase from the previous year and $5 million more than two years ago.

“If I had funding, I would build 1,000 single cells that are enclosed in glass, and give me another 100 deputies just to watch, just to keep an eye on everybody,” Holcomb said.

More funding cannot fix a suicide problem when the entire system is predicated on confinement rather than treatment, according to Wanda Bertram, a spokesperson for Prison Policy Initiative.

“The jail is less invested in care outcomes and health outcomes than they are in preventing security incidents and incidents that may bring them legal liability,” Bertram said. “Jails are not really set up to offer any kind of really solid chronic management of health issues.”

Help outside jail walls

Longtime Newport News Sheriff Gabe Morgan agreed his office needs more funding, but had a different wish list than Holcomb to address deaths by suicide in his jail.

He wants more mental health staff in Newport News City Jail.

Outside jail walls, he wants hospitals closer than five hours away — some people are transported that far when they need temporary detention for mental health concerns. He said more beds should be available city-wide for those not incarcerated, but needing help. He wants more local drug use prevention programs to keep people out of jail and avoid having people spiral when they go through detox procedures while in jail.

“I’ve been on the forefront of fighting for better mental health resources, not only within the facility, but throughout the community,” Morgan said. “Because if we have them throughout the community, it will begin to, I hope, minimize what we see inside. Maybe some people will not be there because, if not for their mental illness, some of them would not be in jail.”

Newport News City Jail has 247 people on staff, including 191 deputies and 56 civilians such as medical or administrative staff. The jail maintains a population of roughly 550 inmates.

Newport News’ 2025-26 operating budget includes 245 staff in the city’s sheriff’s office, including two licensed practical nurses and two registered nurses. That’s one fewer than it allocated the previous three fiscal years. The office requested a roughly $30 million budget from the city this fiscal year. It got $28.2 million, a more than a $2 million increase from the previous year.

When someone attempts suicide in Newport News City Jail, shift supervisors and medical staff are notified, and jail protocol is to immediately administer first aid, then secure the scene afterward — including all evidence — according to Morgan. City police are then contacted to conduct an investigation, including processing the body and interviewing jail staff.

That can take a toll on other inmates, though. Morgan said in one case, investigators needed more than three hours to process the scene before moving the body, leaving it in view of the inmate in the cell across. That inmate asked staff how long the body was going to remain there, and was temporarily moved.

Morgan said he hasn’t seen much of a cluster effect in suicides in custody, and his staff tries to offer check-ins and voluntary reporting after incidents in addition to mental health treatment. By he added it’s a flawed system to rely on people to self-report on their own mental health, especially in an environment where people are often afraid to appear weak.

“I wish I could tell you how we could eliminate it, but if someone has been set on killing themselves, they’re going to do it,” Morgan said. “It’s just a matter of can we delay it long enough or can we get them treatment.”

In-custody death investigations

In addition to Newport News police investigation of jail deaths, the jail’s internal affairs conducts its own non-criminal investigation, which forces staff to cooperate without a Fifth Amendment protection right. Finally, Morgan said his team must submit a report within 24 hours of an incident to the Virginia Board of Local and Regional Jails, which opens a case into it as well.

Every after-action report includes information on whether there were any failings from the jail that contributed to the death. Newport News City Jail adheres National Commission on Correctional Health Care protocols, and Morgan said he has very rarely seen any recommendations for change.

One recommendation from roughly seven years ago advised increasing the jail’s mental health staff, but Morgan said the jail isn’t allocated more resources to make those recommendations a reality. He doesn’t have the resources to have staff attend mental health seminars or workshops.

Morgan said he understands he and the rest of Virginia’s jail system is responsible for doing more to keep inmates alive, but his hands are often tied by a lack of money.

“If corrections is underfunded, then you should expect poor outcomes,” Morgan said. “If training isn’t a priority, you should expect poor outcomes.”

Poor outcomes

Jail suicide rates remained at nearly 50 per 100,000 inmates nationally from 2000-18, according to Prison Policy Initiative data. However, that’s nearly double the rate of state prisons and nearly five times the national nonincarcerated rate.

Bertram said that’s largely because jails often function as transitional centers that hold people for short periods of time, meaning inmates are more likely to be in crises such as active addiction or psychological distress.

Those people are then ripped from whatever existing stability they have, such as a job, housing or therapy and taken to a place where they are isolated from family, have subpar food, hygiene and health care and fear violence or punishments like being sent to solitary confinement, she said.

Bertram said that experience inherently drives some to suicide regardless of whatever resources jails can provide.

“A lot of the reason that people commit suicide in prisons and jails has less to do with the availability of care, more to do with the jail or prison experience,” Bertram said.

Funding more individual cells or additional health care staff limits mental health care inside jails to suicide prevention rather than holistic psychological treatment, Bertram said. She said that fails to address a system that largely functions off people who are already struggling with mental illness, and puts them in environments that exacerbate that illness.

Instead, she said dollars from regional or state entities would be better spent funding community-based efforts that keep people away from incarceration in the first place, such as substance use disorder outreach, transitional housing and community based mental health care.

“You’ve already, by arresting that person, really disrupted their life,” Bertram said. “It just makes a lot more sense to approach this problem in communities rather than being over-optimistic about what jails can offer.”

Devlin Epding, 757-510-4037, devlin.epding@virginiamedia.com

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